In Gratitude

by Jenny Diski

Overview

2016 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Autobiography

The future flashed before my eyes in all its preordained banality. Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness…"So—we'd better get cooking the meth," I said to the Poet.

In August 2014, writer Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given "two or three years" to live. She didn't know how to react. All responses felt scripted, as if she were acting out her part. To find the response that felt wholly her own, she had to face the cliches and try to write about it. And she also decided, facing death, to tell a story she has not yet told: that of being taken in at age fifteen, having been expelled from school, by the author Doris Lessing, and their complex relationship over fifty years.

From one of our most original voices comes a cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid masterpiece about memory and writing; ingratitude and anger; one extraordinary, uneasy relationship; living with illness and facing death.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632866882
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	354 KB

About the Author

Jenny Diski was born in London, where she lived most of her life. Her last years were spent in Cambridge with Ian Patterson, aka The Poet. Her books include ten novels; four works of travel and memoir, including Stranger on a Train and Skating to Antarctica; two volumes of essays; and a collection of short stories. Her journalism appeared in publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Observer, and the London Review of Books, to which she contributed more than two hundred articles over twenty five years.

Editorial Reviews

While her sections about cancer offer unruly testimonies to sickness and dying (and, frankly, living), it's in the sections about Lessing where Diski's idiosyncratic mind—and her bravery as a human confronting both imminent obliteration as well as certain vexing questions that, years later, she's still rolling around in her head—is most potently on display…Diski proves again and again her spectacular originality in her ability to empathize with as well as profess a total failure to comprehend the mind of another human being. These pages are evidence of her undiminished aptitude, even while her body was on the wane, to vigorously inhabit and investigate emotional spaces that shift and change shape as her sentences accrue. While I couldn't read In Gratitude without a persistent lump in my throat, and without the persistent awareness that its author was in a bed, somewhere, experiencing the very last days or hours or minutes of her life, Diski's final book proves transcendently disobedient, the most existence-affirming and iconoclastic defense a writer could mount against her own extinction.

The New York Times Book Review - Heidi Julavits

…Ms. Diski's many books…are mordant and talon-sharp…With In Gratitude, she has written a different kind of cancer memoir, and an almost entirely platitude-free one, simply by writing a typically sui-generis Jenny Diski book. Which is to say, a book that pushes in five or six directions at once. In part, it's about her treatment and her onrushing frailties, and this material is plain-spoken, harrowing and invariably moving. It's also the story of her youth and young adulthood, when she suffered from depression and withdrawal and was in and out of psychiatric hospitals…It's about her tangled relationship with the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing…And finally it is about disease as performance, literary and otherwise…There's a raw, almost feral quality to Ms. Diski's writing about cowering in Lessing's long shadow. It's a trait she brought to so much of her writing. It's just like her to leave us a title…that slowly sheds its softness and sends up a mischievous flare.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

05/16/2016
This revealingly raw memoir by British author Diski (What I Don't Know About Animals) about living with terminal cancer is even more poignant in light of her death on April 28, 2016, shortly before the book's U.S. publication. She spends time indulging in (entirely justifiable) self-pity, but in a manner that is witty and enlightening. From the beginning, Diski draws readers in, describing her emotions upon receiving a cancer diagnosis as "embarrassment" tinged with exhaustion. She then interweaves her experiences dealing with cancer and the subsequent chemotherapy with her memories, highlighting her teenage years living with writer Doris Lessing and the tenuous bond they forged over the next 50 years. Diski dredges up her difficult childhood with bizarre parents—an abusive, perfectionist mother and unscrupulous father—which led to time spent as the youngest patient in a psychiatric unit. Painting a vivid picture of the extreme exhaustion caused by chemo, she relates finding refuge in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which "have always offered me the common sense of my situation." She concludes the book with a series of floating ruminations on life and death. Both heavy and light, Diski's beautifully written memoir is worth any reader's time. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Diski is one of the great anomalies of contemporary literature; she has made a habit, and a career, of writing books that no one else would even think of writing . . . What binds together the disparate elements of her genre-confounding work— part memoir, part travelogue, part criticism, part rant — is the force of Diski’s peculiar personality . . . A marvel of steady and dispassionate self-revelation, Diski’s cancer essays are bracingly devoid of sententiousness, sentimentality or any kind of spiritual urge or twitch . . . They also testify to an inner life of undiminished hyperactivity." - Giles Harvey, The New York Times Magazine

"Nothing she writes ever sounds like it could have been written by someone else . . . [And] the essay form – part digressive memoir, part journey of exacting critical discovery – has always seemed her natural home . . . She has an uncanny ability to connect wildly disparate ideas and make them spark, to take readers on vivid mystery tours along her own neurological pathways, authorial umbrella held aloft. Her essays are often survival stories. And Diski has survived a great deal." - Tim Adams, The Guardian

"The force of Jenny Diski's personality, and the penetration of her mind, are as vivid as anything in contemporary journalism . . . She deserves our unfeigned admiration, not for her bravery or her struggle, or an irrelevant tosh like that, bur for writing so well." - Andrew Brown, The Guardian

"Both heavy and light, Diski's beautifully written memoir is worth any reader's time." - Publishers Weekly

"Sometimes rueful, often oblique, but provocative and highly readable." - Kirkus Reviews

"This is an unsentimental portrait of living with illness and facing death, from one of the fiercest and most uncompromising writers of her generation." - Booklist

"I need a replacement word for fierce. I need something slightly less bloodying than savage and something more devastating than captious. I need a word for Jenny Diski’s undiminished prose in this, her final book, In Gratitude, which is being released in the U.S. just weeks after her death on April 28, 2016, nearly two years after she was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. I need the right word. Don’t have it." - Beth Kephart, New York Journal of Books

"While I couldn’t read ‘In Gratitude’ without a persistent lump in my throat, and without the persistent awareness that its author was in a bed, somewhere, experiencing the very last days or hours or minutes of her life, Diski’s final book proves transcendently disobedient, the most existence-affirming and iconoclastic defense a writer could mount against her own extinction. - Heidi Julavits, New York Times Book Review

"She is sly and wry, with an underhanded humor. It’s there in the title, how easily In Gratitude becomes ingratitude. She began this memoir when she was handed her diagnosis; she may be dying, but her rebellious personality is alive and vibrant and bursting on the page." - The Rumpus

"[A] searing, no-prisoner's-taken memoir." - Martin Rubin, Washington Times

"In her final memoir before her death, Diski, who was quasi-adopted by Doris Lessing, examines the origin, and the close, of her life as a writer." - New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice

"[Diski's] last book is alive with everything that made her great — caustic humor, unrepentant self-scrutiny, a sinuous prose style — and proof that in the hands of some writers, autobiography can be a springboard to limitless possibilities." - Christian Lorentzen, Vulture "10 best books of 2016"

"Diski’s North London truancy in the early 1960s, her initiation into writing through Lessing’s example, and her dry thoughts about her coming end (who would die first, her or Clive James)—these elements make for the final masterpiece of a writer whose prose always delivered the force of her personality." - Christian Lorentzen, New York Magazine, Vulture blog

"Everyone who reads this book will wish she were still around to sit back and half-smile at our discomfort." - Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly

"For me, the most essential aspect of In Gratitude is that Diski never once averts her gaze . . . This is a story about death we want to hear: how it was reckoned with, or even overcome. This is a story about death that doesn’t end in disappearance, that pulls out some sort of grace or perseverance at the close. This is a story about death that is really about resilience, which is another way of saying loss or grief and how we handle them." - David Ulin, LitHub

"Nobody had a voice quite like Diski’s . . . Through it all, you have the sense of Diski turning her life over and over in her lively mind, writing it all down to figure out what she thinks." - Tom Beer, Newsday

"With "In Gratitude," she has written a different kind of cancer memoir, and an almost entirely platitude-free one, simply by writing a typically sui-generis Jenny Diski book. Which is to say, a book that pushes in five or six directions at once." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times, Books of the Times

"Diski was a spare, beautiful, economical writer . . . [In Gratitude] is a sly reminder of the closeness of gratitude and ingratitude: the way one blends or corrodes into the other in life and in memory . . . It is the book of a born fighter that will last far beyond 2016." - Wall Street Journal

"It's a well-told story, partly because she makes us think of the passing of time in a very particular way . . . We know and she knows, that the time to tell all of this is limited. It's very moving." - Evening Standard

From the Publisher

2016-04-13
A winding but elegant valediction from Diski (What I Don't Know About Animals, 2011, etc.), known as a literary journalist and chronicler in England, now resigned to a short tenure on Earth as a "canceree."What is the proper response when the doctor delivers the grim news of an inoperable tumor, an aggressive and untreatable blood condition? The author ponders all the "cancer clichés" that are available to her, deciding on the one hand that she has no major ambitions "except perhaps just lie back and enjoy the morphine" but also concluding that any choice is really not an exercise in free will as much as it is "picking one's way through an already drawn flow-chart." A central figure in her book—more broadly a memoir of intellectual life in a turbulent era than the cancer diary that she first conceived of writing—is the writer Doris Lessing, who took Diski in during a more-than-conflicted adolescence and mined her experiences for her own fiction ("I suppose the fact that she got on with it made the story hers in some way"). Some of the best parts of the book recount table talk with the likes of Robert Graves, Alan Sillitoe, Lindsay Anderson, and R.D. Laing. Diski delivers bittersweetness and resentment in spades, as when she recalls shepherding Lessing's "irritating adoratas from California or thereabout…[who] spoke of Doris as if she were a source of wisdom, and her every move significant." Hopping and skipping across years and topics—"I don't like writing narrative," she protests, "the getting on with what happened next of a story that has a middle, an end, and a beginning"—Diski describes the daily indignities of the cancer patient against a swirling backdrop of mescaline, Dylan, Lennon, and other tropes of her youth, a time of which she deliciously wrote in her book The Sixties (2009). Sometimes rueful, often oblique, but provocative and highly readable.

Kirkus Reviews